TELESCOPE is bent over laughing entertainment. Part of Red Line Productions THE NEW FITZ, a season of ten Australian writers, this show is wonderfully, obliquely … silly. In fact, histrionic, hilarious, high spirited, it is an exercise in advanced silliness. With a whole heap of my viewing-year-so-far bests!
Beginning with best use of an antennae to open a show. Daniel is on the lookout for aliens when we meet him as we enter the theatre. He and his transistor and his aerial are perched on a table centre stage. There is great deal of leaping and arm raising and getting of mixed signals. (Terrific audio cues btw) until his parents arrive.
Mum and Dad get my best in show for most disengaged parents! Only slightly interested in anyone else’s agenda, this absurdly dysfunctional family is completed by the arrival of Lenny. An expert non-listener, she is driven to try and save the family home from the Government’s greedy claws as it buys up the Sydney suburb. Their little home and those around it are the perfect place for a radio telescope and there are big ass bucks to made by selling up and heading out.
Playwright Brooke Robinson took some inspiration apparently from the true story of China’s Guizhou Province where over 9,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes in 2015 in order to make way for construction of the world’s largest radio telescope, designed to search for extraterrestrial life. This is not that story.
This big, broad, rollick through the art of reacting leaves no word untelescoped. Say ‘eyes’ and hands are theatrically drawn up to the face, everything is physical. It’s boom-boom and slapstick and posing. Including the best solo Samba of the year! As directed by Carissa Licciardello, the frenetic pace never lets up. And the cast Tel Benjamin, Alison Chambers, Cecilia Morrow & Nicholas Papademetriou clown around in a deceptively effortless display of logically illogical craziness.
This show really hit my funnybone hard. Really pleased it was only 40 minutes because I couldn’t have taken much more, I wanted throw myself on the floor laughing. Another best in this show … best throw yourself on the floor from an actor so far this year!
Other bests. Best comic use of a rubbish bin. Best rolling of a carpet underneath furniture and best best sudden emotional impact! Because there is another dimension to TELESCOPE and the director, designers and cast pull off the very clever trick of hitting home truths without the use of naturalism. Strings and a single light bulb and all this silliness suddenly has a point.
But I digress from the main game. When your friend splashes water on you at the traffic lights because you are having some kind of can’t breathe, bent over laughing, flashback … you know you have just seen a show you want to recommend. Do your funny bone a favour and see TELESCOPE playing until 12th August at the Old Fitz Theatre.
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